Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States. Quick Facts *'Term of Presidency:' 1913-1921 *'Born:' December 28, 1856 *'Died:' February 3, 1924 *'Marriages' **Ellen Louise Axson Wilson 1885-August 6, 1914 **Edith Bolling Galt Wilson December 18, 1915-1924 *'Vice President:' Thomas R. Marshall *'Ran Against:' William Taft, Theodore Roosevelt (first term); Charles Hughes (second term) *'Nickname(s):' The Schoolmaster in Politics Early Years Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in 1856 in Staunton, Virginia. Growing up in Georgia and South Carolina for a major part of his early life, he was greatly influenced by the Civil War and southern racism, as well as by the Presbyterianism of his father, a minister and teacher. Woodrow Wilson suffered from bad health all of his life. As a young child, he was dyslexic and could not read until he was nine years old. As an adult, he suffered from constant nausea, constipation, and heartburn. He even used a pump to fight stomach acid with water. Wilson had three daughters. Interestingly, his eldest daughter Margaret never married and eventually moving to India to live as a mystic. Younger daughters Jessie and Eleanor were married at the White House in 1913 and 1914. Collegiate Career Because of his health problems, he withdrew quickly from his first college, Davidson in North Carolina, although he graduated from the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) in 1879. He also studied law at the University of Virginia from 1879-1880 and tried to become a lawyer in Georgia, passing the bar in 1882, but he never succeeded in the venture. Wilson is the only U.S. President to hold a Ph.D., which he received from Johns Hopkins in 1886, after he published his dissertation entitled Congressional Government. The book is still admired as a study of legislation in the U.S. Federal Government. Ivy league University Profesor and University President Wilson taught at Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania and Wesleyan in Connecticut before becoming a professor of political economy and jurisprudence at Princeton University in the 1890s. He wrote many books and essays during this time, and was named the President of Princeton in 1902. Governor in 1910 and President in 1912 Wilson accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party for Governor of New Jersey and won in a landslide in 1910. His ambitious, reforming agenda of progressive interests, including that of protecting the people from monopolization, earned him recognition around the country, and the party's nomination for President in 1912. His "New Freedom" platform aimed to revive the economy and was well accepted, and he easily won the presidency, thanks to the coordination failure preswented by the three-way race created by Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party and the Republican Party's nomination of the extremely unpopular William Taft. Roosevelt and Taft split the Republican electoral majority. The Democrats also won Congress thanks in part to his coattails from his plurality popular vote victory. 1912 Election Candidates (state), Political Party, Electoral College Votes, Popular Vote * T. Woodrow Wilson (NJ) and Thomas R. Marshall (IN), Democratic Party, 435, 6,293,152 * Theodore Roosevelt (NY) and Hiram W. Johnson (CA), Progressive Party, 88, 4,119,207 * William H. Taft (OH) and James S. Sherman (NY) Nicholas M. Butler (NY), Republican Party, 83, 486,333 * Eugene V. Debs a.k.a. Convict No. 9653 (IN) and Emil Seidel (WI), Socialist Party, 0, 900,369 * Eugene W. Chafin (IL)and Aaron S. Watkins (OH), Prohibition Party, 0, 207,972 1912 Campaign Spending * Democratic National Committee: $1,110,952 (including $12,500 each from Jacob Schiff and Bernard Baruch) * Republican National Committee: $904,828 (including $35,000 from Andrew Carnegie and $25,000 from J.P. Morgan) * Progressive Party: $596,405 Foreign Policy Presidency In 1915 Wilson ordered a U.S. military occupation Haiti that would become the longest in U.S. history, lasting until 1934. In 1916 Wilson sent a U.S. Expeditionary Force under Gen. Pershing into northern Mexico in a fruitless search for Mexican cowboy revolutionary Pancho Villa. He ordered a miltiary occupation of the Dominican Republic that would last until 1924. He ordered the miltiary occupation of Cuba that would last from 1917 until 1923. Finally, Wilson continued the previous adminsitration's occupation of Nicaragua, which would last until 1925. American public opinion was largely opposed to entrance into the First World War and opposition to the war continued depite the war fever that eventually seized segments of public opinion. Wilson could not take the United States into the war for two years, even campaigning with the slogan "He kept us out of war" during his re-election bid in 1916. Wilson won the election, but then abandoned U.S. neutrality and entered the war on the side of the British and the French. Unrestricted German submarine warfare against U.S. shipping that was supplying Britain and France with war materiel and the U.S. discoverery of a German plot to foster a Mexican invasion of Texas in the event that the U.S. entered the war gave Wilson the grievances to ask Congress for a declaration of war in 1917. By 1918, Wilson had created his Fourteen Points, meant to create a world of peace and cooperation, capped with the creation of the League of Nations. At the Paris Peace Conference, France and Germany signed this agreement, named the Treaty of Versailles (of 1919). However, thanks to a Republican Congress, the United States did not and instead signed a different agreement with Germany. Nonetheless, because of his Versailles efforts, Wilson won the Nobel Prize and was hailed as a savior of peace in Europe. Like the British, Wilson's government backed the anti-communist White armies. U.S. and British troops jointly occupied the far northern Russian ports of Archangel and Murmansk in 1918-1919. U.S. and Japanese troops jointly occupied the Russian port of Vladilostok from 1918 to 1920. As a consequence Russians may fiarly complain that the United States once invaded Russia. During his exhausting campaign for the Treaty of Versailles, Wilson suffered a stroke that paralyzed his left side and prevented him from getting the United States to fulfill his plans for the League of Nations. The stroke also kept him from campaigning for a third term. In the 1920 election, Warren Harding defeated the Democratic candidate James M. Cox. Indian nationalist and future Indian Prime Minister Jawalharlal Nehru commented that the First World War which, "was to have revolutionized the fabric of human affairs...ended without bringing any solace or hope of permanent peace or peace....The 'fourteen points'where are they?" Domestic Presidency By the time Wilson had been elected President, he was already an experienced progressive reformer. Thanks to a Democratic majority in Congress, he is credited with passing one of the most impressive legislative programs in history, including lower tariffs, antitrust legislation, the Federal Trade Commission Act, and the Federal Reserve Act, which created twelve Federal Reserve banks and a board to oversee them. Through this initial progressive agenda, Wilson stabilized the American economy by 1914, just in time for World War I. Later, in 1916, he would pass another impressive line of reforms, taking on child labor and other progressive domestic policy ideas. Unfortunately these also included the Prohibition Act, which helped to entrench enrich organized crime. For all his paternalistic concern about ordinary Americans, Wilson was a white supremacist. Accroding to historican James Chance he held a, "ramantic view of the courtesy and graciousness of the ante-bellum southern plantation owners, as well as accepting uncritically the post-reconstuction South that arranged to keep the black Americans in their place." (p. 43). African-Americans understood what Wilson was long before they heard the "rebel yells" and bands playing "Dixie" in Washington, DC on Inauguration Day in 1913. Their apprehensions were proved correct when Wilson opposed the extension of voting rights to African-Americans in the American South and ordered the segregation of Federal Government office buildings in Washington DC. The ethnocentric Wilson also worried that waves of immigration from southern and eastern Europe would undermine U.S. political traditions. No doubt he included racial segregation uder the category of "political tradition." Wilson held a private White House screening of the controversial, KKK championing 1915 film Birth of a Nation and was claimed by the movie's creator to have boasted, "It's like writing history in lightning." This is unconfirmed but plausible. The unpopularity of the First World War and rising working class militancy in the United States--a wave of strikes in 1919--motivated Wilson to adopt repressive legislation and unleash the repressive apparatus of the U.S. government. From 1919 to 1921 Wilson's Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer orchestrated what were soon called the "Palmer Raids" to arrest thousands of political dissidents. Some were sentenced to long prison terms and others deported. Among the most prominent victims was 63 year old Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, who was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for speaking the following truths during a June 16, 1918 rally in Canton, Illinois: "The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and noithing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose--especially their lives." The Democratic majority in Congress participated in the general political repression by refusing to seat the elected socialist U.S. Representative from Wisconsin: Victor Berger. Retirement and Death Wilson retired to Washington, D.C. and died in 1924, watching the Republicans repudiate many of his ideas. He and his second wife are both interred in Washington National Cathedral. References * James Chance. 2004. 1912. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0743203941. * Erez Manela. "Imagining Woodrow Wilson in Asia: Dreams of East-West Harmony and the Revolt against Empire in 1919." The American Historical Review. Vol. 111, No. 5. December 2006.